Who are the vampires in 'Sinners'?

Plus: Why everyone cares about the "optics" of Los Angeles protests

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s newsletter:

• Some thoughts about how the relationship between social media and protest has changed, and why everyone cares about “optics”

• A new (to me) reading of Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster hit Sinners.

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Fantasy politics

Among the defining dynamics of the Obama Era, such as it was, was a series of neatly arranged, mutually reinforcing ideological convergences around politics, protest, progress, and the software industry. Revolution, mostly peaceful, was spreading across the globe--especially in the Arab world--aided and abetted by nascent social-media platforms, through which activists could coordinate protests and spread their message. Apps like Twitter were all too happy to identify themselves with these democratic movements, use them as marketing fodder, and loudly adopt as institutional values vague principles that might be associated with the generally decentralized demonstrations: egalitarianism, social justice, and freedom of speech. To our stupidest and shortest-sighted critics and pundits, freedom, democracy, progress, and Twitter were all rough equivalents; the arc of history was long, but it bent toward Jack Dorsey.

This understanding was too clean to bear scrutiny even at the time; now, more than a decade later, it seems like a cruel joke. Protests are still entwined with social media, but control now travels in the other direction: It’s less now the case that protesters use Twitter to organize, mobilize, and publicize so much as that Twitter uses protestors as fodder for its continuous generation of free-floating spectacle and fantasy, as John Herrman writes at Intelligencer:

Platforms that were once useful for understanding and following the news became venues for pure spectacular consumption. In some ways this was novel and strange, with hundreds of millions of people consuming individualized feeds determined by automated recommendations. In other ways, it was familiar, since it was a reversion to pre-social-media power dynamics. The platforms were no longer social, in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather centralized and exercising constant (algorithmic) editorial discretion. At least as much as the mainstream media that’s now been twice replaced, TikTok-ified social media rewards decontextualized spectacle. This can be useful for activists to bring attention, generally, to their causes — at least some of the large swing in support for Palestinians can surely be credited to the endless stream of horrific videos from Gaza, which are plenty powerful without further context and don’t require the authority of a trusted follow. More often, though, the lack of a common chronological feed — the crude social-media proxy for a “shared reality,” I guess — produces disorientation, uncertainty, and the ability to retreat completely into ideological safety, pure fantasy, or both.

Last week’s anti-I.C.E. demonstrations in Los Angeles began with people seeking to physically stop I.C.E. agents from detaining their neighbors following series of brutal raids at garment factories and around Home Depot, at least partially mobilized via social media. But they ended up on Twitter and TikTok not as illustrative elements of a pre-existing unified story of connection, freedom, and justice but as the vague subject of a series of disconnected, decontextualized images and videos, selected by the attention marketplace for the feelings they could stimulate, to be reconstructed by the viewer into whatever narrative they preferred. If the Obama era of social media told itself a story of openness and progress in both geopolitics and technology, the Trump era is dominated by fragmentation and delirium.

The increasing loss of even a nominal “shared reality” to the wild swings of a sorting algorithm helps explain why so much of the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere seemed to focus on the “optics” of the demonstrations, even though in neither origins nor desired effect were the protests best understood as an organized exercise in voter persuasion. If the ultimate existence of a political action is as isolated images and videos to be consumed on social media (or, worse, to serve as starting points for generative-A.I. slop), than the only grounds on which to criticize or praise it is the strength and suitability of those images for your political goals.

Worse, but maybe more to the point, if the protest exists mainly as social-media spectacle, your options for engagement are limited to those made available by the platform: Like, share, dismiss, or “react.” Every new quote tweet, with its obligation to add some commentary or analysis, shifts the discourse further away from the activity on the ground and ratchets it up into increasing levels of abstraction: From the conditions of the demonstrations to the “optics” of the demonstrations to a first-principles argument about the point of protest. It’s not like there’s ever been a particularly clear line between “politics” and “political commentary,” but Twitter as a machine seems intent on erasing any distinction that could have been made--or, indeed, intent on subsuming the former into the latter.

(I can’t prove it mathematically but I think this movement into increasing levels of abstraction is analogous to the tendency of Twitter sports discourse over time to move from discussing actual on-field athletic achievements to fantasy-G.M. concerns like “cap space.”)

This isn’t to say that discussion of “optics” is pointless or should be forbidden. Abstracting an argument out can be a useful way to get a grasp on it, just as understanding the financial rules under which a basketball franchise operates gives you some insight into its actual choices. But I think the increasingly disconnected and individualized architecture of a Twitter can compel us to believe that “optics” and other meta-discussions about attention and reception are more important than the actual subjects from which they emerge Because the idea of occupying a shared reality seems so distant, we try to encourage un-criticizable, un-decontextualizable behavior that will look good in anyone’s feed.

That’s a pretty tall order, not that I have any better ideas. The good, and unsurprising, news is that “optics” are not as clear and straightforward as we might imagine--maybe especially in the era of the siloed algorithmic feed.

Robin D.G. Kelley we need you to write about Sinners

I saw Sinners a few weeks ago (some spoilers follow in the text below) and hugely enjoyed it for all the reasons most other people have--it’s a loud, fun, overdone original spectacle of the kind we don’t really get much anymore. But I hadn’t spent much time really thinking about it until I read Tommy Craggs’ Flaming Hydra essay placing the movie in the long and honorable tradition of “Squad Assembles” films:

The movie scarcely needs to tell us what it’s up to: The old gang is getting back together, member by member, each with a specialty or hidden talent that will bear in some way on the events to come, just like in The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen or The Great Escape or The Sting or any of the Ocean’s movies or the Fast & Furious series. Everyone will have a job, and there will be a job for everyone. Everyone will fit somewhere.

You can find examples in the cinema of other countries—Rififi in France, Seven Samurai in Japan—but the Squad Assembles genre really is a product of a particular time in a particular place: postwar 20th-century America. Latent yearnings from that era run just beneath the surface of these movies. […] All the movies in the genre are fantasies in some way of a social wholeness. As Seijo suggests, it is no coincidence that so many of them are set during World War II—during that U.S. wartime period of (nearly) full employment, the largest Squad Assembles production in history. This was a potent moment along every dimension, a sudden expansion in industrial capacity that promised not just a rebalancing of power relations in the workplace and the home, not just a boost to regular people’s purchasing power, not just a world historical priapism for Tom Brokaw, but also a vast refiguring of the variables in the system’s moral calculus, with social need privileged over profit.

For Tommy, the specter that haunts the assemblage of the Sinners squad is resistance to the interwar Jim Crow regime: “Watch the squad assemble in Sinners. Each member exits a different corner of Mississippi’s plantocracy: the segregated train station, the hut on the plantation, the whites-only and Blacks-only grocery stores, the cotton field… This is not a draft. This is a general strike.”

I think this is a good read on the movie, but I would push it even further. What do the movie’s vampires represent, anyway, beyond the dream of a squad permanently assembled--a eternal general strike against mortality, a perpetual mobilization against death? Smoke and Stack, the ex-gangster twins played by Michael B. Jordan, assemble a small and temporary communitarian escape from drudgery and oppression. But Remmick, the Irish vampire who chances upon the juke house, offers not so much a brief diversion as an entirely new settlement: “This world already left you for dead,” he tells Smoke. “Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”

Huh. If we follow Tommy in focusing on Sinners’ historical setting we might note that promises like Remmick’s--a new fellowship, built together across racial lines, in pursuit of dignity, pleasure, and freedom--were relatively common in the South of this period: Robin D.G. Kelley documents in his great Hammer and Hoe the outsize role played by the Alabama Communist Party, among other communist parties, throughout the interwar civil-rights struggle. I’m not saying the Sinners vampires are communists, exactly--the movie is too dense and expansive to function as a simple allegory--but I’m not saying they’re not communists. Remmick is, after all, a materialist, in a vulgar-Spinozan sense: “We are Earth and beast and God,” he lectures. “We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”

If we follow this reading, it’s hard not to see parallels between Sinners and Black Panther, which is much more literally the story of struggle between a tantalizing radical vision of a new universal settlement and a safer conservative dream of limited national liberation. The communists, after all, were not always in harmony with establishment black institutions: In 1932, the year Sinners takes place, the legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A. stepped in to represent the Scottsboro Boys through the appeals process while the N.A.A.C.P., Kelley writes, dithered before attempting to wrest control of the case--one of many such struggles between communists and more conservative civil-rights organizations over the following decade.

Where Coogler comes down on this question is ambiguous. In both Sinners and Black Panther, the dialogue tries to make it clear who the villains are. But the movies themselves, and their generous, flattering depictions of charismatic militants like Killmonger and Remmick, reveal a kind of ambivalence. Smoke’s dream of a carved-out independent space dies in an orgy of righteous violence not long after the final showdown between the vampires and the humans. But Remmick’s vision of an interconnected eternal community survives, still not completed, in the unspeakably cool persons of Stack and Mary.